Reconstruction of audio scenes from a downmix

Abstract

Audio objects are associated with positional metadata. A received downmix signal comprises downmix channels that are linear combinations of one or more audio objects and are associated with respective positional locators. In a first aspect, the downmix signal, the positional metadata and frequency-dependent object gains are received. An audio object is reconstructed by applying the object gain to an upmix of the downmix signal in accordance with coefficients based on the positional metadata and the positional locators. In a second aspect, audio objects have been encoded together with at least one bed channel positioned at a positional locator of a corresponding downmix channel. The decoding system receives the downmix signal and the positional metadata of the audio objects. A bed channel is reconstructed by suppressing the content representing audio objects from the corresponding downmix channel on the basis of the positional locator of the corresponding downmix channel.

The invention claimed is: 
     
       1. A method for reconstructing a time frame of an audio scene with at least a plurality of N audio signals from a bitstream, the method comprising:
 receiving the bitstream comprising the N audio signals signal, wherein N>1; 
 decoding a downmix signal from the bitstream, the downmix signal comprising M downmix channels, wherein M>1 and each downmix channel is associated with a spatial locator of a plurality of spatial locators; and 
 reconstructing the N audio signals based on as an inner product of a plurality of correlation coefficients and the downmix signal, wherein the plurality of correlation coefficients correspond to one or more of the plurality of spatial locators. 
 
     
     
       2. A computer program product comprising a non-transitory computer-readable medium encoded with instructions configured to cause one or more processing devices to perform the method of  claim 1 . 
     
     
       3. An audio decoding system configured to reconstruct a time frame of an audio scene with at least a plurality of N audio signals from a bitstream, the system comprising:
 a receiver for receiving the bitstream comprising the N audio signals signal, wherein N>1; 
 a decoder for decoding a downmix signal from the bitstream, the downmix signal comprising M downmix channels, wherein M>1 and each downmix channel is associated with a spatial locator of a plurality of spatial locators; and 
 a reconstructor for reconstructing the N audio signals based on as an inner product of a plurality of correlation coefficients and the downmix signal, wherein the plurality of correlation coefficients correspond to one or more of the plurality of spatial locators.